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Azure Usage and Billing Insights

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The other thing that I want to call out is that there is now a new billing API available for Azure. And if you Google it, or search for it on Bing, and we’ll– let’s just run a quick search here. Azure billing API, there we go. There is a very nice blog post on it. Now this blog post also walks you through some of the steps that you can take to set up a continuous extract.
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Sorry, that’s the technical documentation. Let’s look at this one here.
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OK it still isn’t the right one. So just bear with me for one second while I search for it.
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There we go. Announcing the release of Azure Usage and Billing Portal. So there you go. So this is an API that has been released– when APIs are released, open source, it creates something beautiful. And this is just a great example of that where a Power BI solution pack has been created which uses the API, along with extract functionality, to pull out the consumption and the spend and show it on a Power BI dashboard with very fine presentation on visualisation. As you can see on the screen here, not only can you track the resources and philtre through, but you’ve got visuals on the trends of usage, times, patterns, times of day.
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You can even pivot that on a map here to see where the most consumption is happening. Again, this is an open source solution and you can navigate to the GitHub repo here, which has got details on how you can set this up against your Azure subscription. So I can’t emphasise enough why it’s important to create APIs in a product. Because APIs, good APIs, and good documentation usually leads to great open source solutions. So that’s really a roundup of cost tracking and optimization. I hope you enjoyed this video and can put some of this to work in your Azure subscription to save some compute and maybe some cost.

The Azure Usage and Billing Insights (AUBI) portal is an open-source project that enables visibility of all Azure services in an Azure subscription(s).

The portal keeps track of billing and ensures that resources are not left running after projects and events have completed.

After it’s deployed, AUBI allows you to register any subscription used by your organisation to be polled daily. The usage is displayed in a configurable Power BI dashboard:

POWER BI DASHBOARD

The following services are available in the Azure Usage and Billing Insights system:

  • Registration: A public website where any user can provide access to the site and register their Azure subscriptions.
  • Dashboard: A website where only authenticated users can see the list of registered subscriptions and trigger a job to regenerate up-to-date billing data in case of any inconsistencies.
  • AzureSQL Server: Holds billing and usage data for all registered subscriptions.
  • Azure Storage Queue: Holds generate data requests.
  • Schedule base (every UTC night): Runs webjob that’s triggered once a day to create generate data requests for each registered subscription.
  • Continuous running webjob: Processes requests that are waiting in the Azure Storage Queue.
  • PowerBI dashboard: Data visualisation of all or per-subscription Azure service billing and usage details such as service unit, quantity, and usage duration.

You can find more information and setup instructions at the AUBI project site on GitHub.

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